Rereading: The Go-Between by LP Hartley | Books | The Guardian Rereading Rereading: The Go-Between by LP Hartley A story of lost innocence, hypocrisy and Britishness – but LP Hartley's masterpiece can also be read as a sophisticated gay novel Julie Christie in Joseph Losey's 1970 film of The Go-Between. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar Ali Smith Friday 17 June 2011 18.55 EDT First published on Friday 17 June 2011 18.55 EDT Share on Messenger Close "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." For the past year or so, when I've been giving readings, I've asked the people in the audience if they know or remember LP Hartley's 1953 novel, The Go-Between. Generally there's a single yes or a couple of yeses; otherwise silence, a shaking of heads. Then I'll say the first half of its first line and the audience will come back loud and strong on their own with the second half.

Certainly Hartley and his multi-awardwinning work (his Eustace and Hilda trilogy, completed in 1947, was hugely acclaimed, and the film version of his 1957 novel, The Hireling, won the main award at Cannes in 1973) have all but disappeared from contemporary literary consciousness. I first read his best-known novel, The Go-Between, at the age of 16 in 1979 (in a Penguin copy with Julie Christie under a parasol on the front, a still from Joseph Losey's 1970 film adaptation), because Hartley was the most contemporary writer on our Sixth Year Studies English course. I opened the same book again for the first time in three decades a couple of years ago. Can a book ambush you? From the prologue ("Are you vanquished, Colston, are you vanquished?") to the epilogue ("Tell him there's no spell or curse except an unloving heart") it felt, as I reread, uncannily familiar, like something I knew – and had no idea I knew – by heart. A combination of knowing and not-knowing is this novel's driving force.

It announced itself to Hartley when he was in Venice in May 1952, working on a completely different project; he put it immediately aside and wrote The Go-Between quite fast, revising his draft as soon as October and November. It's set at – or rather, framed by – the mid-point of the 20th century, "the most changeful half a century in history", when Leo Colston, a man in his mid-60s, sits down in a drab realist 1950s room, the rain hammering at the window, to sort through some old papers. Almost straight away he comes upon a red cardboard box once used for his childhood Eton collars: in it are inconsequential odds and ends; some dried-up sea-urchins, some rusty magnets, "which had almost lost their magnetism", and a diary. He picks each thing up in turn.

"Something came and went between us: the intimate pleasure of recognition." But about the "Diary for the year 1900", with its Zodiac figures circling the announcement of this new "Golden Age", the "glorious destiny of the 20th century", he can remember nothing except a sense of baleful loss. He opens it: the combination lock, which he knows without knowing, is set to the letters of his own name. His own long-gone story breaks open on him all over again. Leo is 12 years old and visiting his upper-class schoolfriend Marcus's family seat, Brandham Hall in Norfolk, in the summer of 1900. He is wearing his too-hot Norfolk jacket (which makes him a sort of clothing joke), having come away unprepared for heat, in fact confident there wouldn't be any such thing, since he considers himself something of a magician; in the novel's prologue he relates how a curse he wrote in blood in his diary last term has caused two bullies to concuss themselves by falling off the school roof. He has ordered up a cool summer in the same way. But the summer is hotter than is imaginable.

"In the heat, the commonest objects changed their nature. Walls, trees, the very ground one trod on, instead of being cool were warm to the touch: and the sense of touch is the most transfiguring of all the senses . . . In the heat the senses, the mind, the heart, the body, all told a different tale. One felt another person, one was another person." He also happens to be a lesser person at Brandham Hall, a mere mortal among its rich gods and goddesses. "For the first time I was acutely aware of social inferiority." He keeps his lower status a secret, though Marcus's mother, Mrs Maudsley (there's a nice Tennysonian hum to her name) has an Elizabethan ability to fix you like a pinned butterfly with her gaze. Marcus's older sister, Marian, is Leo's first encounter with beauty – as if he has met not a person but a concept. "So that is what it is to be beautiful, I thought." Marian, delightful, intuits Leo's embarrassment, keeps his secret about his lack of correct clothing and sweeps him off to Norwich where she buys him a cool green suit.

She is positioned to marry the local Viscount Winlove, Hugh Trimingham, back from the Boer war with half his face scarred so badly that he looks like the god Janus, Leo thinks; one side an end and the other a beginning. Trimingham goes about his business wounded and elegant at once, with a great deal more knowledge of what's happening than he lets on. What's happening is this: the facts of life are about to be taught to Leo, a boy so naive that at first it's comic, then it hurts the heart. As the mercury rises, Leo becomes a kind of Mercury himself, a deliverer of messages between Marian and her lower-class lover, the tenant farmer and local "ladykiller", Ted Burgess, who promises to teach Leo what's what when it comes to "spooning". Much of the novel's humour lies in Leo's sweet literalness, and in the interlocked layers of knowing and unknowing viewed by Colston 50 years on, then by us, far off in our so-knowing future. His prepubescent blankness, when it comes to what "spooning" might be, makes for both funniness and discomfort. Do lady killers really kill ladies?

Meanwhile, he can't say the name Hugh without it sounding, to Marian, like the word "who" or the word "you" – this in a book very much about identity, about who we are in the personal, the social, the historical and the natural senses. Leo is a boy who loves words, was bullied in the first place for using the long word vanquished in his diary for a football match victory; when his curses, astonishingly, seem to have taken effect he ponders what the action of putting words on paper might mean. "It was then I began to cherish a dream of becoming a writer – perhaps the greatest writer of the greatest century, the 20th." His new clothes, his very greenness, liberate him, make a hero of him, and at the same time are his downfall. As much as it is a revelation of the childishness of social hierarchy, of human delusions of power, and of the tragedy inevitable where war or history and innocence meet, Hartley's novel is a fine disquisition on appearance versus naked truth.

"In those days dress was much more ceremonious and jackets were not lightly discarded." Clothes in the novel demonstrate societal stricture, so that the revelation, not just of the sexual act, but of the cross-class sexual act, is contextualised as all the more unthinkable. A beautifully poised bathing scene ("the word denoted an intenser experience than it does now") highlights the apartness of men and women and the frissons of the body. Leo observes the beautiful cornfield-coloured body of Ted Burgess for the first time; it "spoke to me of something I did not know . . . maturity in its most undeniable form", lying near-naked in the reeds, smiling "an intimate, pleased smile, that would have looked childish or imbecile on most people, but on him had the effect of a feather on a tiger." The more clothes Ted had on, "the less he looked himself".

This is a novel of memorably dressed-up theatrical set-pieces: a cricket match that is a little class-war in itself; a concert at which the tension between tenants and landlords, village and Hall, is overshone by a moment that's half real innocence, half hopeless sentimentality; a fierce earthy battle between Leo and a Freudianly insidious Atropa Belladonna (deadly nightshade). The novel signals itself and its seeming concerns almost too clearly – the beautiful doomed farmer cleaning his gun so assiduously. In fact its self-conscious narrative quality, at a glance, can seem a little crude, like a too-obvious jigsaw. But to think this is – yes – naive: The Go-Between is a work winged at the heel and rises above its earthy self in a voice that's expansive. More: something radical happens when this seeming crudeness and this real elegance come together – a revelation of narrative's own naivety in a book very much about the clichés of story, the pressures to conform and the losses and tragedies that arise from such pressures. It is a masterpiece of double-speak and secrecy, somehow both ambiguous and direct.

It works a magic on obviousness, so that it becomes a novel about British embarrassment and embarrassing Britishness. It's a book which subtly, almost mischievously, rejects subtlety: "the facts of life were a mystery to me, though several of my schoolfellows claimed to have penetrated it." But couched and quiet at its centre is a whole other novel at a further level of knowing, innocence and unsaidness. Now, in a reread, I can see what I certainly couldn't consciously have seen or said in 1979, that Leo, in love with both the concept of Marian and the "half-unwilling gentleness", the feather on the tiger, the "natural" body of Burgess, is a go-between in quite another way. With its vision of "foreignness", of the marginalisations inherent in class and sexuality, of the different possible self, the "different tale", it can also be seen as a gentle gay novel, and one of immense sophistication.

Part defeated by repression, part glorious in discretion, part melodrama, part Hardy, part Lawrence; I wonder if its appearance in 1953 and its boldness then with the more surface issues of class and sexuality are partly responsible for Lady Chatterley's Lover finally seeing unexpurgated publication, which it did a decade after the appearance of The Go-Between. Its spirit, unlike Chatterley's, is gloomed, overshadowed by terrible new knowledge, two world wars, the Holocaust and the atom bomb: an "abyss", as Hartley puts it, at the core of the glorious new century. Hartley returns again and again in his critical essays, bewilderedly, as if he can't look away, to this "abyss". So the novel looks backwards in essence, but one half of its face, its war-scarred, war-numbed half, looks forwards, towards Larkin, towards the literary realism of the late 1950s and early 60s. Its voice is echoed today in writers such as Colm Tóibín, John Banville, Paul Bailey, Alan Hollinghurst.

It's no surprise that the film director Losey adapted it and included it in his trilogy of radical works examining Englishness, class, repression and morality alongside The Servant and Accident; the screenplay of The Go-Between is a pristine and skilful reworking by Harold Pinter. Mercury is the god of communication, the god of thieves, the god of artists, the god of the conduit between living souls and dead souls. This novel, a revelation of the tragedy of hypocrisy and the workings of power, of the human need for "calumny" to be "more colourful than it is", also communicates images of a magnetism so strong that "with its strength went a suggestion of beauty and mystery that took hold of my imagination in spite of all my prejudice". It is full of images of rebirth, the most astonishing of which is the final image of the much older Leo literally revisiting his past and coming away again with yet one more romantic errand to run. The real revelation is of something which soars above social hierarchy and even the 20th-century abyss. It is both subtle and crass: a modern kind of sublime.

"One remembers things at different levels." The Go-Between is about books as much as it's about memory. It's a model of the importance of rereading (and God knows we treat books lightly – we wouldn't, after all, expect to know a piece of music properly on just one listen), knowledge and innocence so much part of its structure as to make it a knowingly different book on revisiting. Above all, though, it is a text which works like a charm: books are, in essence, go-betweens, works which conjure rhythm and release across time and history, across places of familiarity and those foreign to us; and personally and individually, too, it's all a going-between, for every person who picks up a book for a first, then a second, then a third time. Ali Smith's There But For The is published by Hamish Hamilton. cfp | call for papers Call for Papers CFP Modernity & the European Mind: Writing the Past, Constructing Identities.

16 & 17 June 2016 full name / name of organization: Centre for Studies in Literature; University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom contact email: Modernity & the European Mind: Writing the Past, Constructing Identities. A two-day international symposium hosted by the Centre for Studies in Literature at the University of Portsmouth. Thursday, 16th June & Friday, 17th June 2016 In 1953, L.P. Hartley famously opened his novel The Go Between with the line "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there". Yet, despite this alleged 'difference' and metaphorical 'foreignness' of the past, contemporary Culture and Literature puts great emphasis on (re)presentations of it. This conference aims to investigate and debate the various representations and rewritings of the modern European past and, in particular, to assess their link to the construction of identities – personal, local, regional, national. Bringing together academics from a variety of disciplines, creative practitioners, storytellers and representatives of various local communities, the conference wants to create a sense of (his)stories of the past and their importance in and for the present.

Topics may include: The Problem With The Force Awakens And Spectre: Not Just Sequels But Pastiches The Problem With The Force Awakens And Spectre: Not Just Sequels But Pastiches {{article.article.images.featured.caption}} Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Full Bio The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. Loading ... Loading ... This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe One of the greatest opening lines in all of literature is from LP Hartley’s wonderful 1953 novel The Go-Between , simultaneously evoking feelings of nostalgia, hope and lost innocence: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ I was reminded of it after watching the latest in a series of films whose opening line is without doubt the most memorable in all of cinema: ‘A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…’ On the face of it there are few similarities between the adventures of Leo and Luke but it’s the memories of the past that most interest me here.

For while the reviews of the undeniably brilliant Star Wars: The Force Awakens have been almost universally enthusiastic – and will no doubt help the film to achieve its estimated $3 billion box office takings and $5 billion in merchandise sales – JJ Abrams’ seventh installment in the franchise (whose aggregate worth is almost $30 billion) is straight out of the past. And if the past worked, then why try to do things differently? LONDON, ENGLAND - DECEMBER 16: Director J.J. Abrams attends the European Premiere of 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' at Leicester Square on December 16, 2015 in London, England. (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images) And that goes to the heart of why cinema can be such a moribund medium. Let’s copy what worked before but just do it bigger.

And slip in a few in-jokes to satisfy all those cynics who actually notice… So in The Force Awakens, the director has liberally stolen the best ideas, scenes and dialogues from the first three films, repackaged them and fed them to an older audience hungry for nostalgia and a younger one who’ve been told that they used to do things differently in the past. Gifted orphan and hermit saviour, masked baddie and huge orb that blows planets up, a fascistic fight to defeat democracy and Freudian family confrontations. JJ Abrams has basically plundered the original three films for things that worked and lifted them wholesale. And who really cares, so long as the film makes a fortune? It’s precisely the same modus operandi employed by Sam Mendes, the director of the 24th James Bond film, Spectre – which has so far made more than $700 billion around the world and is well on the way to trouncing the previous Bond-best of $1.1 billion made by Skyfall. It also, apparently intentionally, became eerily familiar when compared to some of the best of the predecessors.

Bond trapped in a chair as in Goldfinger, a train fight straight out of From Russia With Love, a henchman who looks like Jaws and Oddjob combined, a scarred, cat-loving, Germanically-voiced Blofeld and a miraculously-repaired 1964 Aston Martin DB5. The point is that two of the most anticipated and biggest-grossing films of the year are not just sequels but pastiches, homages, copycats. They did indeed do things differently in the past and, let’s be honest they seem to imply, it was far better back then. Perhaps Picasso was right – all art is theft. So instead of borrowing subtly, do it shamelessly. The Go-Between (Penguin Modern Classics): Amazon.co.uk: L. P. Hartley, Douglas Brooks-Davies: 9780141187785: Books The Go-Between (Penguin Modern Classics) Add all three to Basket One of these items is dispatched sooner than the other. Show details Buy the selected items together This item:The Go-Between (Penguin Modern Classics) by L. P. Hartley Paperback Â£9.98 In stock.

Sent from and sold by Amazon. FREE Delivery on orders over Â£10. Details The Return Of The Soldier (VMC) by Rebecca West Paperback Â£8.99 Only 14 left in stock (more on the way). Sent from and sold by Amazon. FREE Delivery on orders over Â£10. Details Sent from and sold by Amazon. FREE Delivery on orders over Â£10. Details Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1 This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Apple To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. or Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here , or download a FREE Kindle Reading App . Product details Publisher: Penguin Classics; New edition (29 Jan.

2004) Language: English Product Dimensions: 12.7 x 2 x 19.7 cm Average Customer Review: Product Description Review "Exuding such a sense of summer the pages might be warm to touch, Hartley's coming-of-age tale is set during the heatwave of 1900. It all ends in tears, but not before there have been plenty of cucumber sandwiches on the lawn." --"The Observer Narrator Sean Barrett brings his range and sensitivity to this classic coming-of-age novel in which an older man rediscovers his childhood diary. Barrett's natural rhythm contemporises any anachronisms, and his ability to shift between the weariness of the elderly protagonist and the curiosity and vibrancy of the youth he remembers sounds effortless. As the novel journeys into the heartaches of adolescence, Barrett uses his considerable experience to retain the sense of clandestine intimacy that comes with the writing of a diary. Never overstating emotion, Barrett's reading lulls the listener into a sense of security, making the dramatic events that follow all the more dynamic. He perfectly echoes Hartley's tone seamlessly weaving romance, drama, and the verve of youth in this timeless Victorian story.

--- Z.S., AudioFile --This text refers to the Audio CD edition. Book Description L. P. Hartley's enduring coming of age story about a forbidden love and its terrible consequences --This text refers to the Audio CD edition. By Roman Clodia TOP 500 REVIEWER on 1 Aug. 2011 Format: Paperback First published in 1953, in this book Leo looks back to the summer of 1900 when he turned thirteen and was as full of optimism as the new century. Invited to stay at Brandham Hall by a school friend, he allows himself to get embroiled with the adults whose behaviour he simply isn't equipped to understand. And as the temperature rises, so over-heated emotions turn to a tragedy which will mark Leo's entire life. This is a brilliant portrayal of a boy's first brush with the complexities of the adult world (we should remember that youth was far younger then than it is now). The blind and youthful confidence of Leo echoes that of the century, certainly the `ruling classes', having a final high-point before the devastation of the first world war sweeps away at least some of the old social certainties.

But at heart this is as much a novel about the clash of innocence and experience as it is about the old and dawning twentieth century worlds. Leo's artless relationships with the beautiful Marian, the scarred and gentlemanly viscount, and the charismatic village farmer Ted Burgess lead him to participate in, and even try to manipulate, a situation which is increasingly out of control. It is worth recognising that this draws on Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde where Pandarus describes himself as a 'go-between' ('meene' in middle English), an allusion which serves to complicate our reading of Hartley's novel and which poses interesting questions about the characters. Beautifully-crafted and imagined, this is a fine study of lost innocence and haunting betrayal.

The Past is a Foreign Country - Gianrico Carofiglio The Past is a Foreign Country by The Past is a Foreign Country Author: Italian title: Il Passato è una terra straniera Translated by Howard Curtis Il Passato è una terra straniera was made into a film in 2008, directed by Daniele Vicari - Return to top of the page - Our Assessment: Jake Kerridge From the Reviews: "The translation by Howard Curtis is poetic and compelling. Reading Giorgio�s descent into depravity is like watching a slow-motion car wreck as the reader wonders: Will there ever be a line Giorgio won�t cross ?" - Hallie Ephron, Boston Globe "Carofiglios Prosa ist simpel gestrickt, aber er weiß, wie man Atmosphäre erzeugt. Stärker als in den Krimis versteht er es hier, die Geschichte stets einen Finger breit über der Wirklichkeit spielen zu lassen -- sie schwebt in der flirrenden Hitze Apuliens. Die Konstruktion zwingt ihn freilich in ein starres Korsett.

Die Frage, wie die beiden Enden des Seils miteinander verbunden sind, lässt nicht viele Lösungsmöglichkeiten offen. Das blutige Finale stellt die Frage nach Gut und Böse dann mit so massiver Handgreiflichkeit, dass die Moral von der Geschicht' als arg plakativ verbucht werden muss." - Hannes Hintermeier, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung "How do young men from good backgrounds get drawn into a life of crime and violence ? Well, here's a fascinating, succinct and stylish thriller from Italy that makes the process more than believable." - Matthew Lewin, The Guardian "Pacily translated by Howard Curtis, Carofiglio's writing has a drive and focus that expertly balances suspense and reflection.

If his prosecutions begin to match his prose, then the capi of Italian crime have had plenty to worry about of late." - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent "(A) stunner, an intense psychological drama (.....) Self-deception and corruption are at the heart of this unforgettable novel, which also offers a kind of bitter redemption" - Joan Smith, Sunday Times "The novel drifts along aimlessly, and there is a perfunctory subplot about a Carabinieri investigation into a series of sexual assaults which really serves no purpose other than to set up the denouement of Giorgio's story: the detective, Lieutenant Chiti, is too lifeless to rise even to the level of cliché. But give it a chance and you may find, to your annoyance, that you're hooked." - Jake Kerridge, The Telegraph Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole.

We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure. - Return to top of the page - The complete review 's Review: The Past is a Foreign Country is narrated by Giorgio Cipriani. Framed by a short opening and closing chapter set in the present, the novel has Giorgio revisit his past, late 1988 and 1989, when he was in his early twenties and when he befriended -- or came under the sway of -- Francesco Carducci. Giorgio was studying law, progressing well and quickly with his studies; heartthrob Francesco was studying philosophy, two years (and falling further) behind Giorgio. Giorgio comes to the attention of Francesco, and then falls into his orbit: a seductive one of easy money, because Francesco is a card sharp who is happy to enlist Giorgio for his games and manipulations. Giorgio comes from a simple family and seems always to have been rather a good boy and dutiful son. He has an older sister who seemed to be on the right path but dropped out of university, got pregnant, joined a commune.

And now it is Giorgio's turn to rebel. At first, there isn't much rebellion, but he lies to his girlfriend about his rendezvous with Francesco, and he doesn't tell his family about his tag-team card-cheating outings either; he hides the money he wins, too -- and some of what he buys with his winnings, like the fancy car. Giorgio is soon leading a double life that proves ever-more seductive, and soon enough it's the only life he's leading, putting aside his studies, ignoring his family. Francesco, however, remains something of a mystery, and Giorgio can't entirely figure him out; nevertheless, he follows close to blindly, even as the stakes -- and Giorgio's culpability -- get higher. Francesco explains some of the tricks of his trade to him -- including the card tricks that are their bread and butter -- but Giorgio doesn't always seem to learn the entire lesson. So, for example, Francesco tells him fairly early on: Anyone who tells you that life isn't a constant series of manipulations is either a liar or a fool. The real difference isn't between manipulating and not manipulating. The difference is between manipulating consciously and manipulating unconsciously.

Giorgio certainly seems willing to allow himself to be manipulated. He allows himself to get drawn into Francesco's biggest operation yet, which doesn't involve card-playing and has the potential for an enormous payoff (or disaster), and, finally, is drawn into what he recognizes is the abyss: I felt a sense of inevitability. This was my destiny. Everything was about to go to hell, once and for all, and I couldn't do anything about it. A signal failure of The Past is a Foreign Country is that that sense of inevitability is unconvincing; there's no reason for Giorgio's impotence -- indeed, by this point the only explanation for him following this path is a desire for complete self-destruction. Yet Carofiglio has not created a character/narrator that properly (or any other way) conveys what propels him down this path, at this point or earlier. Sure, the card-game excitement is described well, and is obviously seductive -- but Carofiglio doesn't convince in why Giorgio would take the next steps (and especially these final ones). Equally disappointing, the abyss turns out to be a shallow pothole on the road of life .....

Francesco remains a mystery-man, with Giorgio never much bothering to try to figure him out, and their peculiar friendship isn't entirely convincing either. Yes, Francesco shows Giorgio sides of life he'd otherwise never get a taste of, but Giorgio's spiral into a sort of depravity remains a fairly gentle one. Giorgio's narrative is occasionally interrupted by chapters about a young police lieutenant, twenty-six year old Chiti, in charge of an investigation into some brutal assaults on young women here in Bari. The investigation putters along for a while, until finally there is a break in the case; where this is going is pretty clear from the start, but how feebly it is brought to a close is disappointing. The police-investigation thread of the story is, fortunately, a fairly slim one -- relatively little of the book is devoted to it -- but it still interrupts the flow of the rest of the tale. Sure, the two threads ultimately come together, but the only tension left is in the resolution, and Carofiglio doesn't take the bleak, black turn that might have given the novel a bit of a punch.

The title comes from a book Giorgio picks up one day (before he's in too deep), its epigraph the opening line from L.P.Hartley's The Go-Between, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there". The book itself is: A story of adventures, taboos violated, initiations, shame, love and lost innocence. In other words, it's what will become Giorgio's story, just set three decades earlier; indeed, Giorgio already sense as he reads the novel that: "the story was about me". Carofiglio, unfortunately, does not manage to convince with Giorgio's story: The Past is a Foreign Country remains a psychological thriller without the psychology (and a messily put together book). Many of the scenes are quite good -- especially the heady rush of the card-cheating -- but it's a mess of a book. The framing device -- opening and closing chapter set in the present, while the rest is the account of the past -- doesn't help: perhaps if Carofiglio had developed it better.

As is, the past remains too foreign a country, in a portrait that is simply never convincing, and in a story that is exciting only in bursts and ultimately fizzles completely. - M.A.Orthofer, 24 September 2010 First Nighter: London Offers Ralph Fiennes as "Richard III," Mike Bartlett's Somewhat Wild "Wild," Michael Crawford as "The Go-Between" | The Huffington Post What's Working: Small Businesses THE BLOG First Nighter: London Offers Ralph Fiennes as "Richard III," Mike Bartlett's Somewhat Wild "Wild," Michael Crawford as "The Go-Between" 06/24/2016 06:53 am ET David Finkle Writer, Drama Critic London-- It's been four years since the skeleton discovered in a Leicester parking lot was confirmed to be what's left of Richard III. That would be in addition to accounts of him and William Shakespeare's treatment of the briefly ruling monarch (1483-85) and how he murdered his way to the throne. So give Almeida artistic director Rupert Goold a hand for working the event into his revival as prologue and epilogue.

Workers exhume the bones and, after removing various bones, hold up a severely curved spine. Only then arrives Richard, Duke of Gloucester, played by Ralph Fiennes in black modern dress concealing a back disfigured in accordance with the Leicester finding. This Richard III is a stunning production with a simple Hildegard Bechtler set design featuring a large bowl-shaped object hung above the players--Vanessa Redgrave, prominent among them, as an unusually understanding Margaret--that looks like, and could be, metal. But somehow Goold's treatment impresses as being done by the numbers, the high numbers, to be sure, but by the numbers, nevertheless. (The production will be screened worldwide on July 21 and subsequent dates. Check local listings.) There is, of course, the small problem of making the handsome Fiennes convincing as physically ugly from stem to stern, but he's an endlessly resourceful actor and has no trouble illustrating how ugly the relentless Richard is at his core. Fiennes does have difficulty expressing the errant king's eventual attacks of guilt, but that's not his problem. It's Shakespeare's.

That this is a modern-dress take isn't disturbing, although watching the Bard's well-played characters manipulate iPhones, which they do here, is no longer amusing. The conceit has now descended to cliché levels. It seems particularly silly when Fiennes and other cast members suit up in armor for the Bosworth battle. Do they communicate by electronic devices then? No, they don't. ****************** At first you might think that in Wild, at the Hampstead, Mike (Charles III, Cock, Bull) Bartlett has something very specific to say about Edward Snowden's heroic (traitorous?) whistle-blowing action. You might think as much because Snowden-like Andrew (Jack Farthing) is holed up in a Moscow hotel while being quizzed about a recent international episode. The interrogator is a Woman (Caoilfhionn Dunne) in black, who's introduced herself as Miss Prism but later confides that her name is George. After bidding for Andrew's agreement to speak publicly on behalf of the Russian government but not succeeding, she leaves and is quickly replaced by a tall, slim Man (John Mackay), who also calls himself George.

He claims to know nothing about the previous George and goes about pressing Andrew to represent the Russians. When he fails, the first George returns, claiming she has no knowledge of the other George. She eventually receives Andrew's acquiescence. So far there's nothing in Wild along the lines of insight into the real Edward Snowden, which isn't, of course what playwright Bartlett is after. Commissioned by artistic director Edward Hall for a piece, Bartlett has taken advantage of the Hampstead's multi-faceted technical abilities for a play making a broader statement about someone who's abandoned a recognized life for an unknown existence. This means that the abundant glib George talk is really in preparation for a coup de theatre that'll illustrate how Andrew has chosen to turn his world upside down--or at least sideways. It's something to see, when it suddenly occurs under James MacDonald's direction, Miriam Buether's ingenious set design, Peter Mumford's lighting design and Christopher Shutt's sound design. Whether the profusely slick banter that precedes it is equally worth the intermissionless 90-minute time is in more doubt.

****************** When Michael (Phantom of the Opera) Crawford in the dark enters Michael Pavelka's gaudily somber set for The Go-Between, he pulls a string to turn on a single light bulb. When he does, the stage becomes only slightly less dark for a good reason. The beloved 1953 L. P. Hartley novel--that famously begins "The past in a foreign country; they do things differently there"--is a seriously dark piece, and the creators want to keep it that way. As a result, composer-lyricist Richard Taylor and bookwriter-lyricist David Wood have produced an elegant chamber musical, directed with enormous style by Roger Haines. Crawford plays disillusioned 63-year-old Colston, who opens a trunk and removes a diary that begins to shed more than sufficient light on the past. It illuminates the foreign country where Leo (Luka Green), Colston's 13-year-old self, visits privileged friend Marcus (Samuel Menhinick, at the performance I saw) at Brandham Hall.

There and before understanding what he's agreed to do, Leo becomes an eager "postman" delivering letters between upper-class Marian (Gemma Sutton) and rugged lower-class farmer Ted Burgess (Stuart Ward)--theirs developing into as doomed a romance as the class difference destines it to be. The Go-Between, often described as concerning the loss of innocence, is more accurately described as innocence not lost but carelessly stolen by adults who should have known better. Moreover, Hartley wants to show the life-long devastation the theft sets in motion. Taylor and Wood have woven their music and lyrics more as nearly sung-through underscoring rather than a collection of discrete songs. The only instrument is an on-stage piano played by Nigel Lilley. The result is enthralling. Crawford, in an effective return to musicals, does most of the singing and through it draws the touching portrait of a defeated man. The small cast surrounding him lends great support.

The Go-Between review – Michael Crawford time-travels through song | Stage | The Guardian The Go-Between review – Michael Crawford time-travels through song 3 / 5 stars Apollo, London This evocative chamber piece, based on LP Hartley’s 1953 coming-of-age novel, is done with taste and style but never quite soars A window on the past … from left, Gemma Sutton, Michael Crawford and William Thompson in The Go-Between at the Apollo, London. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian Wednesday 8 June 2016 05.50 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 8 June 2016 17.00 EDT Share on Messenger Close Is LP Hartley’s 1953 novel a good subject for a musical? Mercifully, there are no dancing parlourmaids or rousing rural choruses in this elegant chamber version, and Richard Taylor’s score provides a rippling piano accompaniment to David Wood’s adaptation. Yet, for all the determination to do Hartley proud, I found this a curiously austere night out. The big question is how you handle the story’s time structure.

Bookended by a prologue and epilogue, the bulk of the novel consists of the ageing Leo Colston’s recollections of a Norfolk summer in 1900. Invited by a school friend, Marcus, to spend the holidays at his family’s country house, the young Leo finds himself used as a messenger boy by Marcus’s sister, Marian, who is carrying on a clandestine affair with a tenant farmer, Ted Burgess. Ultimately, the affair is uncovered, leaving Leo feeling a mix of pubertal confusion and emotional jealousy that damages his adult capacity for love. In director Joseph Losey ’s 1971 film, Harold Pinter’s script brilliantly wove together past and present. An idyllic shot of Marian and Leo riding in a sunlit carriage was accompanied by the voice of Leo’s older self murmuring: “You flew too near the sun and were scorched.” Wood and Taylor aim for the same effect by filtering the action through the memory of the senior Leo as he leafs through his boyhood diary. Michael Crawford is on stage throughout, looking back at his younger self and sometimes communing with him directly.

But a device that Tom Stoppard used effectively in The Invention of Love , where the older AE Housman gazes wistfully at himself as an emotionally reticent student, here becomes oppressive. Put simply, the focus on memory means the action in the Norfolk of 1900 doesn’t really take independent flight. Pinterest Ghostly creatures … Sutton and Stuart Ward in The Go-Between. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian Roger Haines’s production, first seen at West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2011, does its best to overcome this through its simple evocation of the past: a trip to a Norwich tailor is evoked through a line of clothes hangers and, as in the book, the climactic discovery of Marian and Ted in flagrante is suggested by the opening and closing of umbrellas. But the main characters, first seen as ghosts from whom Leo seeks release, never shake off their ethereal quality. Gemma Sutton lends Marian a duplicitous gaiety and Stuart Ward as Ted has a Lawrentian virility, but they remain figures in Leo’s mind. The evening rests heavily on Crawford and William Thompson (one of three boys playing Leo), who are excellent.

Crawford, exuding a desiccated sadness, sings Taylor’s score beautifully and sculpts each line carefully, so that even a banal lyric such as “the colours were clearer the nearer I flew to her” achieves genuine poignancy. Thompson also catches exactly the bewilderment of the boy Leo and is deftly partnered by Archie Stevens as the more assured Marcus. It is all done with taste and style. But although the text is shot through with references to Icarus, the story never quite flies because we cannot escape its catastrophic effect on the adult Leo. The novel, as so often, proves a foreign country; they do things differently there. • At the Apollo , London, until 15 October. Buy tickets at theguardianboxoffice.com or call 0330-333 6906. 1191: The Past - explain xkcd 1191: The Past >| The Past [ edit ] Explanation "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there" is the opening line of " The Go-Between ", a novel by L. P.

Hartley (1895–1972), published in London in 1953. Black Hat notes that a country's past military tends to be less advanced than its current one, and that countries in the past had larger oil reserves as they had consumed less oil then. If a country from the past existed in its old state today, other countries would likely leap at the opportunity to exploit its oil reserves. Or: Black Hat could be considering sending the modern troops of a country from today back in time to rob the oil from the countries in the past. It could be profitable to invent a time machine for just that. "Mozart in Mirrorshades" is a short story by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, which features the use of time travel to exploit earlier eras' natural resources. Also, in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, time has been exploited to use as energy. They say: "The Past is like a foreign country.

They do things exactly the same there." The "If history has taught us anything" phrase is used to start several quotes: "If history has taught us anything, Arthur muses, it is that men with mustaches must never achieve positions of power." - Tom Rachman, The Imperfectionists "If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone." - Michael Corleone, The Godfather The title text starts by fitting the usual pattern of this phrase, but in the second half humorously subverts it. It extends the "past as a foreign country" metaphor by implying that lessons learned from history can count as military intelligence to use against it. [Cueball and Black Hat talking.] Cueball: Well, you know what they say. The past is a foreign country- Black Hat: -With an outdated military and huge oil reserves! Black Hat: Hmmm... refresh comments! Discussion WOW. When I first read the comic, I assumed it was making an analogy to current countries. Like ones that have been invaded because of their oil reserves.

When I saw the image-text, my thought was "We can destroy time like we've destroyed these countries." The above explanation makes a lot more sense. 76.106.251.87 06:17, 27 March 2013 (UTC) I don't think there's a distinction. "If history has taught us anything, we can use that information to destroy it". If you destroy the country in the past, then you 'destroy' that timeline of history. (Of course, current consensus seems to be that you'd branch off into a new timeline and both will exist in parallel universes, but nonetheless - to the antagonist - it could well count as a destruction. 220.224.246.97 08:50, 27 March 2013 (UTC) Perhaps, but nothing I was saying was referring to time travel. 76.106.251.87 00:47, 29 March 2013 (UTC) The past is a foreign country most probably means his own country.

You would not conquer your own country today, but the past is something totally different - it is foreign and ready for exploitation. Anyone else thinking of time travel? I think BlackHat was planning to get a time-machine (somehow), bring a whole army through and conquer a nation. It's an easier way to become a mighty overlord, ruling over continents and enslaving millions of people. World domination turn out to not impossible after all, aside from the time-travel stuff. 129.59.52.45 02:43, 28 March 2013 (UTC) BHG has made a time machine before. 50.159.5.112 04:46, 28 May 2013 (UTC) Does this have anything to do with the previous comic (Time) ? I'm guessing (out of the blue) that the next comic will be "The Present", and the next one "The future". 193.239.192.194 12:43, 28 March 2013 (UTC) Did anyone think about Iraq?

This comic comes quite close to the 10-year anniversary of the war, and the description of the "foreign country" quite resembles what Iraq was at the time. 88.174.44.135 19:28, 28 March 2013 (UTC) Did anyone NOT think about Iraq ? I though THAT parallel is so basic it doesn't need to be mentioned ... although mentioning the anniversary probably make sense, this information may be lost when someone will see this page later ... -- Hkmaly ( talk ) 12:14, 31 March 2013 (UTC) I didn't really think about Iraq, but I did think about Gruinmarkt even though this isn't time travel as such. -- Pmakholm ( talk ) 12:56, 4 April 2013 (UTC) Something should be mentioned about Black Hat incorrectly finishing Cueball's sentence(s).

199.27.128.60 ( talk ) (please sign your comments with ~~~~) "If a country from the past existed in its old state today, other countries would likely leap at the opportunity to exploit its oil reserves." Shouldn't that say United States instead of other countries. Not all countries are oil-hungry warmongers. Tharkon ( talk ) 19:20, 5 August 2014 (UTC) I think Black Hat is saying that the past is a foreign country that physically exists, we should take it over for oil. 108.162.238.157

Question: Which 1953 novel begins with the line “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”?
Answer: THE GO-BETWEEN